Bottelary

If American authors Raymond Carver and Charles Bukowski had shown more interest in visiting wine farms than drinking themselves into painfully advanced stages of cirrhosis, my guess is that Bottelary would have been their favourite parts of the Stellenbosch Wine Route. For this is still real farmer country, here along the Bottelary Road. Where wineries and houses and sheds look like they are lived and worked in, perched on hills covered in low-level bush-vines, industrial looking bulk wine dealers jostling for attention with hard-drinking houses known around here as Bush Pubs or Divorce Activators.

Things have been getting quite emotional about the gnarled old vines scattered throughout the Cape Winelands. And yes, they are magnificent plants adding to the brooding atmosphere of some of the more robust and rural wine regions. The sight of an ancient vineyard, dense and obtuse vines pointing their wrinkled shoots at the heavens, set among the rolling hills of Bottelary or Malmesbury, can be mesmerising.